


A Missing Piece

by SingingInTheRaiin



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: 11 & 12 & 13 are all technically one number lower, F/F, Gen, Happy Ending, M/M, a brief glimpse at the post-war Doctors without Rose, and has no reason to regenerate into a pretty boy, because without Rose the Doctor doesn't get shot by a Dalek
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-10
Updated: 2020-01-10
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:42:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22202788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SingingInTheRaiin/pseuds/SingingInTheRaiin
Summary: "The Doctor set the explosives, double checked that there was no one else left in the building (felt a spot of guilt for the dead man in the basement that he hadn’t been able to save), and then he set off the detonator and ran for it. As he got back into the TARDIS, he was suddenly struck with the feeling that he had forgotten about something very important, though he couldn’t imagine what it might be.The TARDIS seemed oddly upset too, and he knew that she didn’t care about the Doctor blowing up Autons. So what was wrong? He tried to take a quick peek at his immediate timeline, but from what little he could see before the headache set in, nothing was wrong. So why did he feel like something was so terribly wrong?"Rose Tyler does not exist. The Doctor goes through life feeling like something important is missing.
Relationships: The Doctor (Doctor Who)/Rose Tyler, Thirteenth Doctor/Rose Tyler, Twelfth Doctor/Rose Tyler
Comments: 9
Kudos: 141





	A Missing Piece

The Doctor set the explosives, double checked that there was no one else left in the building (felt a spot of guilt for the dead man in the basement that he hadn’t been able to save), and then he set off the detonator and ran for it. As he got back into the TARDIS, he was suddenly struck with the feeling that he had forgotten about something very important, though he couldn’t imagine what it might be. 

The TARDIS seemed oddly upset too, and he knew that she didn’t care about the Doctor blowing up Autons. So what was wrong? He tried to take a quick peek at his immediate timeline, but from what little he could see before the headache set in, nothing was wrong. So why did he feel like something was so terribly wrong?

Well, there was nothing to be done about it now. The Doctor tracked down an Auton that hadn’t been in the shop, and used it to find the Nestene Consciousness. It took him an embarrassingly long time to realize that the transmitter had been right in front of him, and then he snuck in. The Doctor already knew that there was no point in trying to negotiate. The Nestene knew what it was doing when it came to invade Earth, so the Doctor threw his anti-plastic into the giant vat of goo, and then made a run for the TARDIS. 

After he’d piloted away, he turned back to grin and bask in how impressed his latest companion must be, only to remember that he was alone now. And he was always going to be alone, because the Time Lords were gone, and he wasn’t fit to be traveling with anyone else. All he’d do is drag them into danger that they didn’t deserve, and the Doctor couldn’t bear the idea of watching anyone else that he cared about getting hurt. 

So he left, and resolved not to visit Earth again for a while. Whenever he was there, it felt too much like home, and it was too tempting to take a little piece of it along with him.   
,,,

Back on Earth again, and there was a Dalek trapped deep in an underground bunker. The Doctor knew better than to touch the thing directly, no matter how weak it was, but he couldn’t deny the enjoyment he got out of seeing such a monster brought so low. In the end, torturing it didn’t feel as good as he’d thought it would, though, and he found a weapon in the bunker that could kill the dalek for good, regardless of how much had been paid for its capture. Leaving a dalek alive could never end well.  
,,,

The Doctor didn’t like Captain Jack Harkness, for bringing such destruction to London even if he hadn’t meant to do it. That didn’t mean he couldn’t appreciate the change of heart, though, and the Doctor saved Jack’s life. He wasn’t appreciative enough to do more, though, and simply dropped Jack off back in his own time. The man was surely clever enough to find something to do on his own, and Jack certainly didn’t seem too interested in traveling with the Doctor even if the option had been on the table, which is definitely wasn’t.   
,,,

The Doctor met Martha, and he could tell she was thrown by his gruff exterior, but she was so clever, and he was so lonely, so he reluctantly decided to bring her along with him. And it was rather nice to have a companion again, and the Doctor decided that he might just get used to having people around again.  
,,,

Giving his life for Wilf’s was hardly a bad trade. The Doctor was rather fond of Donna’s grandfather, and he knew that Donna would kill him if he let anything happen to Wilf. So he braced himself for one of his most painful deaths yet, and was almost surprised when he was able to survive enough to regenerate. 

Once he was back on the TARDIS, after saving the world with the help of one Amy Pond, the Doctor put away his tattered leather jacket and big boots and cozy jumpers, and replaced them with button ups and a waistcoat and bow ties. When he looked at himself in the mirror, he couldn’t help thinking that it was so very odd. Of course he felt like a different person, he always did after regeneration, but he couldn’t help thinking that there was something else the matter. And from what he could tell, the TARDIS felt the same way. The Doctor was supposed to look like this, but he was missing something important. Had there meant to be something else in between?  
,,,

The Ponds were safe in the past, and they were together which is what mattered most. The Doctor knew that he could always go back and visit them as long as it was outside of Manhattan, but he also knew that he probably never would. Would he even be the Doctor anymore if he seriously considered the idea of revisiting anything or anyone from his past? No, probably not. It was just so much easier to keep moving forward, without ever looking back.   
,,,

The Doctor looked at his past two selves, and the memories of being them during this time slowly trickled in. He remembered looking down at the Moment, ready to activate it, when a strange girl had appeared. He could hardly recall anything about the way she looked other than the fact that she had bottle blonde hair. 

_“Who are you?” he had asked her once he realized that she was the interface for the weapon he was about to use._

_The girl had let out a long laugh and leaned back, giving him a small shrug. “I’m nobody. Not here, not now, not ever. I wonder why that is, Doctor, don’t you?”_

_The Doctor had immediately protested. “Everyone is someone. Even the interface for the galaxy eater is someone.”_

_The girl gave him a long look, and then he knew that he had saddened her deeply. “Not me, Doctor. I think perhaps I was supposed to be someone, but I never got the chance.” And that was all that she would say on the matter._

Then the Doctor snapped back to the present, and did a few clever things before helping himself to pull off the impossible and save his planet, tucking Gallifrey away so that the Daleks would destroy themselves and there would be a chance to rescue Gallifrey someday.

All was supposed to be right with the world, but now that the Doctor had remembered the Moment better, he couldn’t help wondering why the sight of that girl had made him feel impossibly sad. He’d just saved his entire planet instead of killing it, but he felt like he couldn’t truly celebrate the victory when something so important was still missing. Too bad he didn’t know what that important thing might be.  
,,,

Bill was clever and good, but then she was gone, just like everyone was eventually gone, and the Doctor wondered if he was cursed to always lose the people that he was foolish enough to let in.  
,,,

The Doctor waved goodbye to the fam as they wandered off the TARDIS. It was time for some routine maintenance on the old girl, and instead of letting the three humans die of boredom as they floated around in the vortex for a few weeks, she would just drop them off at home and then pick them up after a couple of hours had passed for them.

The doors shut, and the Doctor’s shoulders slumped down. She hated when the ship was empty, because it always left her feeling too alone. She felt a pang of comfort from the TARDIS as the ship assured her that she would never be alone, and the Doctor ran her hand lovingly over the console. “Oh I would never dream of not counting you among my friends,” she assured the ship. “Though I do miss that time when we were able to directly speak with each other. That was quite lovely, wasn’t it?” She felt the TARDIS’ agreement, and the Doctor grinned widely before grabbing her tools and opening panels to slide underneath the console.

The Doctor had only been tinkering for a couple of hours when there was suddenly a blaring alarm in her ear. She moved so quickly to investigate that she smacked her head on the underside of the console, and had to take a moment to grumble under her breath before she slid out and stood up. She looked at the monitor, but didn’t see anything unusual. “What’s going on?” 

Before she could get any answers, something crashed into the side of the TARDIS, and the whole room shook, knocking the Doctor back to the ground. She scrambled up to her feet, but not in time to get to the doors, which were being pushed open.

The Doctor clutched her sonic screwdriver tightly, and watched as someone stepped into the ship as if they belonged there. As if they hadn’t just entered from the time vortex, because there was certainly no indication that they’d landed anywhere, and the Doctor could still see the headache inducing technicolors that made up the vortex.

There was so much light coming in from outside the ship that the Doctor could only make out a vague silhouette, and then the door was gently closed, and the Doctor was left squinting at the stranger. It was a young woman who looked to be in her early twenties, wearing a short blue leather jacket and jeans with patches of flags from all the independent nations on Zongoria. Blonde hair with brown showing at the roots was pulled back in a tight bun, though a few strands had fallen loose to frame the woman’s face. She had big brown eyes that crinkled at the corners when she grinned at the Doctor. “Oh thank god I found you. I was afraid that I’d be left wandering around forever.”

The Doctor frowned, though she did ease up on her grip of her screwdriver. “Sorry, but who are you?”

There was a brief pause, and then a look of hurt flashed across the woman’s face. The strangest thing, though, was the feelings that came from the TARDIS herself. The Doctor could tell that her ship immediately trusted the intruder. That never happened, even with people that the Doctor brought onboard herself, and especially not with stowaways, or whatever this situation counted as. “You don’t remember me,” she stated, voice full of resignation. She let out a bitter laugh and then leaned back against the doors of the TARDIS, arms crossed over her chest. “Let me ask you a philosophical question, Doctor. If someone is never born, and therefore never exists, and therefore never leaves a single mark on the world, then are they still a real person?”

The Doctor furrowed her eyebrows. “What are you-?”

“Weeping angels send people back in time to consume the rest of their timeline, and they are quite frightening creatures. But there are others that are far scarier. Scarier than the things you forget about the moment you stop looking at them, scarier than something that claims to be the devil and may have actually been telling the truth. If you die, then you were still there, you were still a part of it all. But if you were never even the slightest thought in somebody’s mind…” 

Even to someone as old and knowledgeable as the Doctor, the girl’s ramblings didn’t make much sense. “Are you talking about- about going back and killing someone’s parent to prevent them from being born?”

The girl shook her head. “No, I’m talking about something far more lethal. There’s a creature out there, one that we encountered together, and it eats people. Not their physical form, but something much worse. It consumes everything that a person ever was and ever could be. It doesn’t just remove the person from the memories and thoughts of the ones who knew them, it actually removes the person entirely from their own life. Like they were never even there. And when you don’t exist, and never did, you’ve got no physical body left because it was never created.”

“Supposing that there is such a thing out there- and based on what I’ve stumbled across throughout my life I’m inclined to believe you- how could you be here in front of me, clearly in a physical body, if you were never born?”

The girl sighed, and as the Doctor took a few wary steps forward, she saw the dark bags under the girl’s eyes that showed her exhaustion. “See, if I was literally anyone else, I wouldn’t be here right now. I’d be completely gone in every way, shape, and form. There would be no time or universe in which I had ever existed or ever would. But I’m not anyone else, I’m me. Don’t bother asking me my name, I don’t have one, never did. Anyways, despite how it appears, I am not an ordinary human, in more than just the traveling that I did with you. Or didn’t do, I suppose. I’m also something else, something more. Something that knew what would happen to me someday, and made sure to help. This body was made for me, out of plastic if you can believe it. And then I woke up and all traces of the original me were gone. I have all the same memories and feelings and experiences, except I’m a copy of someone who doesn’t even exist.”

Even though it was painful to do so, the Doctor thought back to Rory the Roman, and to her own plastic copy with the bowtie and the chin. “If you really travelled with me then you wouldn’t need to try and convince me that such a thing is possible.”

The girl tilted her head as she looked at the Doctor. “We didn’t spend every minute together. I missed out on an entire regeneration of yours. Meeting you, being with you, being able to stay with you, it was never exactly easy.”

Both of them just stood there in silence for an entire minute after that, as the Doctor acknowledged the truth in those words, both in the girl’s emotions and in how much they rang true in regards to most of the people who entered the Doctor’s life. “So how did you find me here, then? We’re in the time vortex at the moment, not exactly like I’m parked on a corner for you to just pop in. And you were able to open the doors, too.”

There was a brief pause, and then the girl reached down to grab at a chain that went around her neck and was tucked beneath her shirt. When she pulled it free, the Doctor could see the key hanging off of it that she immediately identified as a TARDIS key. Between that and the fact that the TARDIS seemed quite pleased with the girl’s presence, the Doctor decided that she really didn’t have any reason not to believe the girl’s story, at least not at the moment. “Finding you in the vortex is much easier for me than trying to search through all of time and space. The vortex exists every time and place at once, as you know.”

The Doctor crossed her arms over her chest as she moved even closer to the girl. “But how did you even enter it without some kind of vessel? And navigate through it well enough to find me?”

The girl grinned, and it was an unusual looking one, with a bit of her tongue sticking out. The Doctor wasn’t sure why the sight made her feel warm inside. “I already told you that I’m not an ordinary human, but I didn’t just mean because I’m made of plastic. You probably won’t believe me, but I once looked into the heart of your TARDIS, and for a brief moment, and for all of eternity, we became one.”

Now that was just ridiculous. No one could look into the heart of a TARDIS, not even Time Lords, so how could…? There was a feeling of acceptance broadcasted into the back of the Doctor’s mind and she knew immediately that it came from her ship. She reached out to gently touch the console, and frowned when she saw a ketchup stain smeared across it. 

Even though she knew that now wasn’t really the time to be worried about such things, the Doctor grabbed the nearest scrap of paper that could be used as a makeshift napkin, and wiped away the offending condiment. Then her frown deepened when she saw that beneath the ketchup were two words carved into the console in Gallifreyan of all things. “Bad Wolf,” she read out loud. “When did that- why did that-?” She slowly looked up at the girl, who had wandered away from the doors, and over to the jumpseat. The girl brushed her fingers over every surface that she passed, and had the look of someone who was seeing their home for the first time in a long while. 

The girl had a fond look on her face as she looked at the TARDIS. “You don’t even know who I am, but you missed me anyways, didn’t you? You and I are sisters, afterall. Or would have been, if I was real.” She waited a beat, and then grinned, as if the TARDIS had just confirmed what she said. Then she looked over at the Doctor. “You were always just the slightest bit jealous that I could talk with her in a way that you could not. Well, I guess more at the fact that she could talk back to me. Not quite words, and yet something more clear than the feelings that she can share with you. I’m glad that I haven’t lost that. I might not exist, but at least the TARDIS knows that I’m meant to be here.” 

The Doctor watched silently for a few minutes as the girl slowly moved around the console room, touching every surface, her face full of equal parts longing and joy. When the Doctor cleared her throat to speak, she could see the way it startled the girl. “What do you think I could even do to help you?”

The girl arched one eyebrow. “What makes you think I’m here for your help?”

“Why else would you seek me out even knowing I wouldn’t know you?” 

The longing on the girl’s face finally overtook the other emotions, and she bowed her head forward, looking intently down at the floor. “Is it really so difficult to believe that I came to you because I like being around you?” She clasped her hands together behind her back, presumably to prevent herself from fidgeting. “You and I have a long history- or we’re supposed to, anyways.”

There was another awkward moment of silence before the Doctor thought of another question that seemed important. “Where did we meet? Or where would we have met if you existed?”

This time the smile on the girl’s face held so many feelings that the Doctor could not even begin to identify them all. “It’s quite mundane, really, at least compared to everything that should have happened after. A shop in London of all places. In 2005. A basement, just after closing.” When the Doctor squinted her eyes as she tried to remember, the girl added, “You were big ears and leather back then, still trying to recover from the end of the Time War. You always told me that I helped heal you, though clearly you did just fine on your own.”

As the girl talked, the memory slowly surfaced, and the Doctor remembered blowing up the shop, and the anti plastic, and the Nestene Consciousness. She also knew that that was right around the time she’d started feeling as though there were something important missing from her life. She’d quickly gotten used to that feeling, enough so that she was barely even aware of it anymore. For a while she’d just assumed that it had come from losing all of the other Time Lords, but now that she thought about it, the feeling had never gone away even after Gallifrey had been restored. “That’s…” but she didn’t even know what to say. 

It wasn’t possible, but it was almost as though the girl read the Doctor’s mind as she started to reach out, but then dropped her arm. “I’ve missed you,” she breathed out, and the look in her eyes was one so full of love and adoration that the Doctor didn’t know how she ever could have forgotten having such a thing directed towards her. “My head feels so empty without you in it. If I was real, we would have bonded, after I returned to you, when you were grumpy and old looking. You gave me your name, but now I can’t even remember my own because it was never spoken into existence.”

The Doctor started to reach out as well, without even thinking about it. “Can I-?” She wasn’t even entirely sure what she was asking for, or how the girl seemed to know anyways. The girl just nodded, eyes glistening with unshed tears. The Doctor gently pressed the tips of her fingers to the girl’s temples, and then closed her eyes as she silently asked to be let in.

But the inside of the girl’s mind was too painful to stay for longer than a few seconds. It was just a vast expanse of blinding white nothingness, and the Doctor yanked herself free reflexively. She stared at the girl as they both panted for breath as if they’d run a marathon. Or maybe a few marathons in the Doctor’s case, since just one wouldn’t be enough to slow someone with a superior respiratory bypass. 

They both just stared at each other for several long seconds, and then the girl leaned back against the console, somehow perfectly positioning herself so that she didn’t accidentally hit a single lever or button. “You know, I’d say that you should be able to relate at least somewhat to how it feels to not exist, though without me in your life you never would have had to deal with those reapers, and you told me that Amy brought you back so fast that you didn’t even have time to know that you were gone, so I guess it’s not really the same. You didn’t exist for a few minutes, but you didn’t have to live with the knowledge that you weren’t real.” 

“We really bonded?” the Doctor practically whispered. She’d been close with certain companions in the past, but she couldn’t imagine wanting to bond with any of them, no matter how much she might have loved them, if only because she knew she was always fated to outlive them. But maybe it was different with this girl, this impossible girl who had looked into the heart of the TARDIS and survived. 

The girl nodded. “It seemed like the only appropriate thing to do for two people who were so sickeningly in love.”   
And even though the Doctor didn’t have the slightest itch of a memory of being so sickeningly in love, she suddenly wanted to feel that, more than anything. “Is there any way to fix this?”

“I’m not sure,” the girl admitted, shoulders slumped down. “I’m not exactly an expert on being wiped from existence. It’s so much different than the threat of death and danger; it’s so much more difficult to figure out. But if I had to make a guess… I only survived my extinction because of my connection to the TARDIS. Maybe looking into her heart again would-”

The Doctor found herself shaking her head before the girl could even finish talking. “That’s too dangerous!”

There was a wry little smile on the girl’s face when she responded. “What’s the worst that can happen? If I die, you probably won’t remember me and I really will be gone forever. No, not gone, just never here in the first place. And if I succeed then I might be able to figure out how to fix everything. I may not have the best memories of my five minutes as a goddess, but I know that I was able to see everything in all of time, so if anyone could figure out an answer to this problem, it would be that version of me.” Then she shrugged, an apologetic look making its way across her face. “Sorry. Guess I really am just another person looking to the Doctor for help.”

The Doctor rolled her eyes. “If you were really bonded to me, you’d know that I like to help wherever I can.” Still, the thought of smashing up her darling ship enough to expose the core, and letting someone intentionally gaze upon that light… If the girl really could succeed, she’d have more power than anyone in the universe was ever meant to have. But somehow, despite not having even the slightest inkling of a memory of her, the Doctor knew that she could trust the girl not to abuse that power, for however long she might hold it in her grasp. “Alright, you can look. But I- I can’t-”

“I know,” the girl interrupted in a gentle voice. She reached out to grab the Doctor’s hands for just a moment to give them a light squeeze. “If you go down below you’ll find a switch that opens the console. No explosions or truck hauling required.” 

It should have felt wrong to put that much trust in anyone. The Doctor had never even trusted her own wife or children as much as she apparently did this girl, but it felt right, and the TARDIS definitely did not send out any warnings of danger. So the Doctor gave the girl a small smile. “I’ll give you two minutes to do whatever you need to do, and then I’m closing the old girl back up.” Then she went downstairs to the room below the console room. “You ready?” she shouted up. 

She wasn’t sure if the girl had been able to hear her or not, but there was suddenly a light flashing back and forth between pink and yellow, showing off a button that the Doctor had somehow never seen before. She took a deep breath in, and then slowly let it out before pressing the button. 

The Doctor squeezed her eyes shut and started counting the seconds, even though as a Time Lord she really didn’t need to do that to know when two minutes had passed. Just before she reached the end of the first minute, though, the Doctor suddenly felt an intense headache coming on. The kind that always happened when alternate timelines attempted to settle properly in her head. Only this one was much more intense than any that the Doctor could remember feeling in quite a while. 

The memories filtered through slowly at first, but then got faster and faster as more of them flooded in. The Doctor could remember her life where it always felt like she was missing something but didn’t quite know what. But she could also remember having Rose, meeting in the basement of Henrik’s, and that first word of “Run!” She remembered having Rose, and then losing her, and then when the Time Lords had been restored, the Doctor had been able to cross into alternate universes, but had chosen not to, having already made her peace with the idea of Rose living out her days with the human Doctor. Rose ended up being the one to come back, after outliving the human Doctor and her family. They’d been together ever since, up until…

Until they’d gone to a new planet, one that the Doctor knew nothing about. It was during one of their dates, so the fam hadn’t been with them. They’d encountered a bizarre creature that looked like a giant spider with no eyes, and was covered all over in mouths. And it also had much more than eight legs. Both blondes had run for it, racing back to the TARDIS hand in hand, until one of those long, grotesque legs reached out and almost grabbed Rose. But instead, Rose’s eyes had glowed golden for a moment, and then the creature had stumbled, giving the women enough time to get back into their ship and get away. 

As the Doctor tried to reconcile the very different versions of events that were running through her mind, it occurred to her that Rose was still upstairs, and the Doctor had no idea what Rose remembered. She scrambled to get back to the console room, and the TARDIS seemed to appreciate the urgency, moving the rooms closely together so that it took hardly any time at all for the Doctor to reach her destination.

She burst into the console room and ran over to Rose, and then paused in front of her bondmate, taking in every detail. The Doctor was tempted to pull out her screwdriver to run a few scans and see if Rose was still plastic or not, but she found herself too caught up in staring at Rose’s face to do anything else. It was the strangest feeling, to know that she’d just seen her wife a few minutes ago, but to also know that she hadn’t really seen Rose in all of time. And both memories felt all too real. 

Rose stared at the Doctor just as intently, and after a few moments, suddenly threw herself forward and wrapped her arms around the Doctor. The Doctor caught Rose and immediately returned the hug. They pressed their foreheads together, and just stared into each other’s eyes for what felt like ages. 

Eventually, the Doctor felt the need to pull back, if only to make a more thorough inspection of the other woman, to make sure that she was truly alright. “What do you remember?” she asked so quietly that she almost thought she hadn’t said anything at all.

Rose blinked slowly, and then frowned. “All of it. Or both ways, or however you want to say it. I feel the way I did after we visited my dad, only on a much bigger scale. There I go messing with history again. It’s strange, though, because you would think that I wouldn’t be able to suddenly remember the things that my plastic clone did, but I do.”

The Doctor closed her eyes as she moved forward to cling to Rose again. “How long were you- were you like that?”

Rose shrugged as best she could with the Doctor holding her so tightly. “I’m not sure. Maybe eternity, or my entire life. Maybe only a few minutes. Hard to say. I just know that I was searching desperately for you the whole time, even though I hardly knew anything at all. I love you so much, Doctor.”

“I love you too, with all my hearts,” the Doctor whispered back. 

They remained together for what felt like hours, and then eventually retreated back to their bedroom. The Doctor looked around to take in all of the familiar details, and wondered how she’d never noticed when they were missing. They both collapsed down onto the bed and then continued to hold each other, simply taking comfort in each other’s presence. 

Rose slipped off to sleep at one point, but the Doctor stayed awake and just continued to watch over her wife, taking in every single detail. She wanted to make sure that she would never be able to forget Rose again. After a while, Rose’s eyes fluttered open, and she gave the Doctor a sleepy smile. “You’re my favorite, you know that?”

The Doctor grinned, and leaned over to get in a better position to cuddle Rose. “What a funny coincidence, because you’re my favorite too. Don’t tell the fam, though. Wouldn’t want them getting jealous.”

Rose laughed, and the beautiful noise seemed to sear itself into the Doctor’s hearts. No, she could definitely never let herself forget about any of this again.


End file.
